Farsi Class

Farsi, originating from the old empires of the Middle East, is the language of poets and dreamers. It is the main language of Iran, Tajikistan and Afghanistan (where it has a different name: Dari), and its roots lay in Old Persian, a language that was spoken in the Achaemenid Empire, 2500 years ago. The capital of that empire was Persis, and the language was therefore called Persian.

There are worldwide 110 million speakers of Farsi, with 4 to 5 million people living abroad. Through experience I discovered that Persians who live abroad often have a very close knitted group of Persians around them, with whom they talk Farsi and have cultural meet-ups with. To keep track of all my Persian friends and family, I decided to take up the challenge and start learning Farsi.

When you are constantly emerged in a strange language, you will automatically pick up some words and sounds. My boyfriend talks a lot on the phone and at one point I could exactly imitate the start and the end of his phone talks. Another helpful topic to start learning Farsi was food. I already knew a lot of food terms, because his family taught me during dinner. Funnily enough, the first words I learned were: namakdun and felfeldun (salt and pepper), repeatedly pointed at by his mum.

The enthusiasm of Persians about me learning Farsi is amazingly sweet. People really take the time to explain the language and always ask me about my progression. Sometimes I felt like a monkey doing tricks, when we were in a Persian gathering and people asked me to say the alphabet or count. But it actually really helped me stay motivated to learn more and more. I don’t care being the monkey, I like to learn more tricks; D.

The Farsi alphabet has 32 letters. Ahh, easy you would say.. But there are some tricky elements for people who are used to the Roman alphabet: there are five kinds of ‘z’, four kinds of ‘s’, four kinds of ‘g’, of which some of them are pronounced like gurgling throat sounds. And these throat sounds don’t sound very charming, you have to rasp your throat and gurgle the letter out of your mouth. This originates from Arabic, which has a lot of words that come from deep inside the mouth.

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When the Arabs invaded parts of the Sasanian Empire (in the current Iran) in 651, Farsi was for some years the primary language of the area. But under the reign of the Ummayad Caliphate, Arabic was imposed on the Persians and became the state language. Although Farsi got heavily influenced by Arabic during the years, it survived and people never stopped speaking it. The Persians especially adopted a lot of Arabic religious terms, because Persians were Zoroastrians before the Arab conquest and did not know much of the Islamic belief. With the arrival of the Muslim Arabs, their Zoroastrian faith declined heavily.

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Farsi characters are written from right to left, with question marks and comma’s the other way around! And to make it even more tricky; Persians don’t write the vowels down, although they do say them. When you read Farsi, you only see a bunch of consonants written down and you must know what word to make of it. Furthermore, you cannot always hear what kind of ‘g’, ‘s’, ‘h’, ‘t’ or ‘z’ is used. You need to recognize and learn to write every word separately. Hence, learning Farsi means learning a lot of vocabulary.

In the Farsi class we have a lot of fun; two Russian girls, my Farsi teacher Helia and me, it’s two hours full of giggles every time. And repetition is the key, Helia let’s us repeat every single sentence and word a couple of times. Slowly the language sneaks into my brain and lays its’ roots throughout.

خداحافظ (khodahafez: goodbye)

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